Posts Tagged ‘Firefall’

Oh thank goodness. My life is saved. I, of course, recently bet it on the assumption that more Firefall videos would drop this week, and became quite disconcerted when maniacally grinning mercenaries started showing up outside my house with calendars counting down to Friday. Happily, however, I’ve been saved by the Dreadnaught, who sounds like the cheeriest of fellows. Bask in his muscular, minigun-toting glory (read: a hail of unstoppable bullets) after the break.

After giving us a glimpse of the assault battleframe’s quick-drawing, rapid-firing revamp, Red 5’s now taking a leisurely fly-by trip through Firefall‘s entire summer milestone update. The short version? No class is safe. From having their space stockings stuffed with tons of neat presents! So now we’re onto the Engineer and the not-a-Medic-anymore Biotech. Yes, they’ve renamed that one. Apparently constant use of poison is grounds for having your medical license revoked. Who knew?

Soon, the Firefall you know and love/haven’t actually played/have never heard of and know nothing about will be gone. Like a caterpillar entering a cocoon, the high-flying MMOFPS will soon emerge from the “biggest patch in Firefall history” as a sleeker, more graceful butterfly. With a jetpack. Among many other things, that means the Assault battleframe (the separated-at-birth brother of the Warframe) is in for an overhaul. In short, it’s about to become a lot faster and get some cool new toys to boot. Watch it do assault-type things after the break, as is its wont.

The beta for jetpackin’ online shooter Firefall has been in progress for a while now, and I posted some impressions on it over here. Since then Red 5 have been busy collating feedback from players and are now getting stuck into tweaking and rebalancing the game in light of all the data and suggestions they’ve received from the community. They’re overhauling the development and specialisation of the battleframes, which will have far-reaching consequences for the kinds of choices you’ll have to make as you play, fight, and gather resources. Check that out below.Read the rest of this entry »

I think they should have had a go at explaining it in semaphore, but instead they’ve gone for the fashionable route of a glitzy video which shows off the space-time rip story that serves as a backdrop to Firefall’s territory-conquest alien-world crossover activities. Go take a look at that, below, and then at my preview, which is the most handsome preview you will read all day.Read the rest of this entry »

Red 5 are keen to stress that the current beta for Firefall – their free-to-play jetpackin’ shooter – is not one of those betas which is essentially a demo for the game you will be soon be playing, but is instead still very much a work in progress. That means my impressions should be regarded as commentary on an unfinished thing that is subject to change. That said, I’ve got a feeling this game could end up being quite significant, and – despite its clearly unfinished and underpopulated beta state – I’ve found it to be rather interesting. Read on for vital thoughts.Jetpacks Wheeeee >>

I love this sort of stuff: Red 5 Studios talking about the world-building process within Firefall. You get to see a bunch of the tools in action as they create the game environments, and the team talk about some subtle details of how the game has been put together, like the living processes in the game, cut & pasting entire cities, and the PvP maps being incorporated into the open world. Worth a watch.

I’ve been waiting for a large-scale sci-fi MMO shooter ever since the original Planetside, and it looks like 2012 will do it’s best to provide. Before I fuel up Firefall’s jetpacks, or scrawl penises over Planetside 2’s map, it looks like I’ll be dropping into Line of Defense: of all those games, it’s the first with a release date, end of June, so I’d imagine the beta form that I just signed up to will deliver me from orbit to the action a tad sooner than the others. You know what? I’ve just noticed all those are free-to-play*. I mean, I knew that all were, but lumping them all together makes it quite the thing. As is the not-at-all-MMO-but -rather-shooty Tribes: Ascend. I wonder if I’ll ever need to pay for a shooter ever again? Line of Defense trailer is herein, btw.Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a sneaky way to get a hold of a lot of Firefall footage. Developers Red 5 Studios are hosting a competition for their fans, asking them to create a trailer from unreleased footage of the free-to-play shooter. So while you can totally get involved and whip out Windows Movie Maker templates, if all you’re interested in is watching 10 second clips of the game, all you need to do is download the files and have a peek.Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a bunch of new content appearing in the Firefall beta, and Red 5’s bossman Mark Kern has been wheeled out to explain precisely what is going on in a new dev diary video, which you can see below. Basically signing up gives you a chance to sign up, and then to invite others. Kern also does some clever stuff with a map made of lasers. I’m genuinely interested to see how the PvE world works, which is what Red 5 are beginning to roll-out properly now. If there game can give players a genuine sense of urgency in fighting the NPCs, rather them just being a conveyor-belt of MMO-style targets, then it could make for an interesting proposition. I’m a bit less interested in the PvP because, well, Planetside 2, or Tribes Ascend. Anyway, there’s some new footage in there, so take a look.Read the rest of this entry »

Firefall developers Red 5 are going further than simply expressing their denunciation of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in words. On January 18th, the studio will close the Firefall beta and website for 24 hours in a show of protest. More drastically, the developers are also refusing to show the extremely promising free-to-play multiplayer shooter at E3 this year because of the organiser’s support of SOPA. Commendable. More below.

Not content with the impressive CG versions of their main characters from multiplayer open-world shooter Firefall, Red 5 Studios have gone a bit overboard on the cosplay and brought in pros to play the parts of a couple of their armoured cartoon soldiers. I don’t think the jetpack actually works, so he won’t be making a Jingle All The Way entrance to PAX or anything. Yes, it’s more than faintly ludicrous, but I couldn’t help playing into the hands of this bizarre promotional strategy: seeing a grown man and woman enthuse about wearing plastic space armour is something we should all witness. As, you know, a warning.Read the rest of this entry »

There are the jetpacks, of course, which instantly drew out a nod of approval, but my first impressions of Firefall were only of mild interest. The marketing campaign has been rarely effective though, not because of increasing bombast or social network integration which would be more likely to make me ignore it’s attempts to inflitrate my life, but because it has increasingly taught me what it will actually be like to play. The latest developer diary is another convincing burst of information. It sits before me and tells me how the various classes will work and, most importantly, why that will be fun. Observe.